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TEXT-BOOK OF POETRY;

FROM

ORDSWORTH, COLERIDGE, BURNS, BEATTIE,
GOLDSMITH, AND THOMSON.

WITH

SKETCHES OF THE AUTHORS' LIVES,

NOTES, AND GLOSSARIES.

FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND CLASSES.

BY THE

REV. HENRY N. HUDSON.

BOSTON:

PUBLISHED BY GINN BROTHERS.

1875.

H

FARVARD

OCLLEGE

LIBRARY

40x82

Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1875, BY HENRY N. HUDSON,

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

J. F. Loughlin, Book, Job, and Music Printer, 18 Post-Office Square, Boston.

PREFACE.

is really as important that people should be disposed to read at is good, as it is that they should know how to read. For the lity to converse with books is as liable to abuse as any other gift, I is in fact as much abused at this very time, and that too to the ry of the readers themselves, both in mind and heart. It is undantly in proof that, of the books now appearing from day to 7, the meanest and the worst, those made up of the cheapest and foulest sensational flash, are read a great deal the most. The son of this surely must be that, while people are taught to read, e care is not taken to plant and cherish in them right intellectual d literary tastes. In our education, therefore, it is of prime conen that such tastes should be early set or quickened in the mind; at while we are giving people the ability to converse with books, pains should be spared to inspire them with the love of books at are good. Once possess them with a genuine, hearty love of few first-rate authors, and then their culture in all its parts, so far books can minister to it, is duly cared for: that love, those tastes, ill become a sort of instinct, to prompt and guide them to what is holesome and pure. And in this, as in other things, the ways of urity and health are also the ways of lasting and ever-growing leasure and delight. The abiding, uncloying sweetness, the livg, unwithering freshness of books in which conscience presides, ruth illuminates, and genius inspires, are the proper food and deectation of a chaste and well-ordered mind; and to have a due sense nd relish of those qualities, is at once the proof and the pledge f moral and intellectual health: for here it may with special fitess be affirmed that "love is an unerring light, and joy its own ecurity."

It is on this principle, it is with a constant view to this end, that I have worked in selecting and ordering the contents of the present volume. These are the thoughts that prompted, and have throughout governed, the undertaking. In my own teaching, I have long felt the want of such a text-book, and have supplied the lack thereof as I best could. As for the reading-books, of which so many are in common use, I neither could nor would have any thing to do with them. I have no faith in them whatsoever: the very principle of

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